I admit it. Today's theme is partly an excuse to sit in the shed on a spring morning and sing aloud, with occasional assistance from iTunes and Midi files. Snivel through Linden Lea and Ar Hyd y Nos, wake up with Ten Green Bottles, Frère Jacques, John Kanaka-naka too-ri-ay. Express all sorrows with O Waly, Waly and Will Ye No Come Back Again?, then swing into Nkosi Sikelele Africa and God Bless America, before reverting to Molly Malone. Or Lili Marlene. Croon Flower of Scotland, and harmonise with Chumbawamba for a compelling ditty about the 1911 strike at the Idris drinks factory:

“Now then girls all join the Union

Whatever you may be

In pickles, jam, or chocolates

Or packing pounds of tea”

Can't let the Left have all the best tunes: deep breath, go for the British Grenadiers before balancing out with a pacifist moan of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Fill the lungs, bawl the chorus, startle yourself with the robustness of the words and the way the tunes uplift them. Sing Onward Christian Soldiers then drone “Imagine there's no heaven” - you needn't mean either. Singing itself does you good, at any age.

And here we hit the news story. One unalloyed good that new Labour promoted is music in schools: slowly it is creeping back to prominence, and the Music Manifesto includes a demand that children should sing for at least five minutes a day. So far, so good. But in a classic example of meddling overmanagement, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced last year a “national songbook” of 30 songs that every 11-year-old should know. This prissy, prescriptive idea has just been abandoned because nobody could agree on which 30. Instead, the Sing Up website has a hundred, ranging from Clementine to Polish skipping tunes, and puts new ones up weekly. It still hasn't nerved itself to include Land of Hope and Glory, but it's doing fine.

Yet Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”

I am sorry to hear a Cameroonian so infected with new-Labouritis. Michael, man, chill! It is not the role of ministers to prescribe which songs children sing. Insist they sing something, provide an online facility to help timid teachers, pop in the multiculti stuff - fine. But a compulsory list of songs to be learnt by 11? Mad micromanagement: bossy, borderline fascist.

The joy of songs, as I well remember from bawling them out in a village school, is that they let you channel the emotions of others, from glee to sorrow to rebellion. They link you viscerally to their writers and their circumstances. What better way to teach history, or indeed the emotional aspects of sex education? I learned about hopeless love with “Did you not hear my lady go down the garden singing?”, about resistance to tyranny by roaring out “And shall Trelawney die?”, about Nonconformist fervour with “To be a pilgrim”. The agricultural calendar is fixed in my head by The Farmer's Boy (you plough and sow, then reap and mow). My first feminist stirrings occurred at 6 when Schools Radio taught us to sing about Sweet Polly Oliver, who dressed as a boy to follow her lover to war (though admittedly, it was her nursing skills that pulled him through). Female defiance is for ever fixed by Mary Hamilton, made pregnant by a careless monarch and condemned to death, but spitting from the gallows when he tries to save her:

“O haud your tongue, my sovereign Lord!

An ill death mat ye dee!

If ye had wished to save my life

Ye'd never ha' shamed me!”

And I rejoiced when my own children, every May Day, belted out the wonderful Sydney Carter song about John Ball, leader of the Peasants' Revolt: “Who'll be the lady, who will be the lord, when we are ruled by the love of one another?” In a rural area such socialist sentiments had real bite, especially during the Thatcher years.

Indeed, I have long felt that we are barking up the wrong tree with a dreary “citizenship” curriculum full of worksheets about local elections and diversity panels. If you want children to feel passion about that stuff, first light the human fire in them. Dig out the rebel songs - British, American, Caribbean, Indian, Polish. If you want them to get a feel for the ironies of Irish history, sing The Minstrel Boy and The Wearing of the Green - and then Behan's sour The Patriot Game. Let Chumbawamba help you through the Industrial Revolution, and Ol' Man River through the era of slavery. Dig out fierce old songs about right and wrong and bad barons; songs link you to the way other hearts beat.

We need that empathy. It is, I am told by one staunchly old-Labour teacher, quite possible to enjoy the breathless ta-ran-ta-ra of John Peel while opposing hunting, just as you can sing about running off with the Raggle-Taggle Gypsies (“O what care I for my new-wedded lord?”) without condoning adultery. “It's about ways that human beings feel. We should teach that,” says this exemplary woman. And startlingly added - “When we did Nazi Germany I played them the Horst-Wessel-Lied, so they saw how emotion can be used for evil.”

So to hell with letting ministers lay down 30 inoffensive yet compulsory songs. Throw the net wide, and rejoice in the crazy, beautiful if sometimes misshapen fish. Songs distil all humanity: ministers rarely do.

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